No Arabic abstract
The scale of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) imprinted in the matter power spectrum provides an almost-perfect standard ruler: it only suffers sub-percent deviations from fixed comoving length due to non-linear effects. We study the BAO shift in the large Horndeski class of gravitational theories and compute its magnitude in momentum space using second-order perturbation theory and a peak-background split. The standard prediction is affected by the modified linear growth, as well as by non-linear gravitational effects that alter the mode-coupling kernel. For covariant Galileon models, we find a $14-45%$ enhancement of the BAO shift with respect to standard gravity and a distinct time evolution depending on the parameters. Despite the larger values, the shift remains well below the forecasted precision of next-generation galaxy surveys. Models that produce significant BAO shift would cause large redshift-space distortions or affect the bispectrum considerably. Our computation therefore validates the use of the BAO scale as a comoving standard ruler for tests of general dark energy models.
Modified theories of gravity have received a renewed interest due to their ability to account for the cosmic acceleration. In order to satisfy the solar system tests of gravity, these theories need to include a screening mechanism that hides the modifications on small scales. One popular and well-studied theory is chameleon gravity. Our own galaxy is necessarily screened, but less dense dwarf galaxies may be unscreened and their constituent stars can exhibit novel features. In particular, unscreened stars are brighter, hotter and more ephemeral than screened stars in our own galaxy. They also pulsate with a shorter period. In this essay, we exploit these new features to constrain chameleon gravity to levels three orders of magnitude lower the previous measurements. These constraints are currently the strongest in the literature.
In this work, we obtain measurements of the Hubble constant in the context of modified gravity theories. We set up our theoretical framework by considering viable cosmological $f(R)$ and $f(T)$ models, and we analyzed them through the use of geometrical data sets obtained in a model-independent way, namely, gravitationally lensed quasars with measured time delays, standard clocks from cosmic chronometers, and standard candles from the Pantheon Supernovae Ia sample. We find $H_0=(72.4pm 1.4)$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ and $H_0=(71.5pm 1.3)$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ for the $f(R)$ and $f(T)$ models, respectively. Our results represent 1.9% and 1.8% measurements of the Hubble constant, which are fully consistent with the local estimate of $H_0$ by the Hubble Space Telescope. We do not find significant departures from general relativity, as our study shows that the characteristic parameters of the extensions of gravity beyond general relativity are compatible with the $Lambda$CDM cosmology. Moreover, within the standard cosmological framework, our full joint analysis suggests that it is possible to measure the dark energy equation of state parameter at 1.2% accuracy, although we find no statistical evidence for deviations from the cosmological constant case.
In the framework of classical scale invariance, we consider quadratic gravity in the Palatini formalism and investigate the inflationary predictions of the theory. Our model corresponds to a two-field scalar-tensor theory, that involves the Higgs field and an extra scalar field stemming from a gauge $U(1)_X$ extension of the Standard Model, which contains an extra gauge boson and three right-handed neutrinos. Both scalar fields couple nonminimally to gravity and induce the Planck scale dynamically, once they develop vacuum expectation values. By means of the Gildener-Weinberg approach, we describe the inflationary dynamics in terms of a single scalar degree of freedom along the flat direction of the tree-level potential. The one-loop effective potential in the Einstein frame exhibits plateaus on both sides of the minimum and thus the model can accommodate both small and large field inflation. The inflationary predictions of the model are found to comply with the latest bounds set by the Planck collaboration for a wide range of parameters and the effect of the quadratic in curvature terms is to reduce the value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio.
We develop an approach to compute observables beyond the linear regime of dark matter perturbations for general dark energy and modified gravity models. We do so by combining the Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy and Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure approaches. In particular, we parametrize the linear and nonlinear effects of dark energy on dark matter clustering in terms of the Lagrangian terms introduced in a companion paper, focusing on Horndeski theories and assuming the quasi-static approximation. The Euler equation for dark matter is sourced, via the Newtonian potential, by new nonlinear vertices due to modified gravity and, as in the pure dark matter case, by the effects of short-scale physics in the form of the divergence of an effective stress tensor. The effective fluid introduces a counterterm in the solution to the matter continuity and Euler equations, which allows a controlled expansion of clustering statistics on mildly nonlinear scales. We use this setup to compute the one-loop dark-matter power spectrum.
We perform a detailed comparison between a recently proposed parameter-free velocity-dependent one-scale model and the standard parametric model for the cosmological evolution of domain wall networks. We find that the latter overestimates the damping of the wall motion due to the Hubble expansion and neglects the direct impact of wall decay on the evolution of the root-mean-square velocity of the network. We show that these effects are significant but may be absorbed into a redefinition of the momentum parameter. We also discuss the implications of these findings for cosmic strings. We compute the energy loss and momentum parameters of the standard parametric model for cosmological domain wall evolution using our non-parametric velocity-dependent one-scale model in the context of cosmological models having a power law evolution of the scale factor $a$ with the cosmic time $t$ ($a propto t^lambda$, $0 < lambda < 1$), and compare with the results obtained from numerical field theory simulations. We further provide simple linear functions which roughly approximate the dependence of the energy loss and momentum parameters on $lambda$.